


To Fly and Crash

by Major



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, Hope, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 09:55:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22848262
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Major/pseuds/Major
Summary: Ainsley meets Edrisa.  One laugh from across the room shouldn't change a person's life.Somehow, however, it does.
Relationships: Edrisa Tanaka/Ainsley Whitly
Comments: 8
Kudos: 20





	To Fly and Crash

Ainsley couldn’t remember the last time she smiled because she meant it. In the studio, she was directed. With her mother, she often performed. For Malcolm, she pretended. For her father, she didn’t.

The carefree, happy laughter that wafted from the sofa caught her attention because it was genuine, and warmth was unfamiliar these days. She often wondered if her father hadn’t passed her something worse than bad memories and shame that shouldn’t have belonged to her but did, if he didn’t take a shovel to the very core of their entire family on the day he was arrested and bury a little block of ice. The cold ran so deeply inside of her, it took hold of everything she tried to grow over it and braided frost through the roots that chased away the warmth.

That laughter wasn’t a studio trick to draw in viewers. It wasn’t a mask to distract concern or confuse that worry into silence. That laugh was happy. Ainsley both begrudged and envied it.

“Hi,” she said as she walked over.

Malcolm’s apartment wasn’t big enough for all of the people currently in it, but there was a killer on the loose with an interest in her brother (a curse that chased him from boyhood all his life) and all those threatened, family and friends alike, were in secure quarantine at his place while guards stood outside and the police hunted another person set on destroying the Whitlys’ chances. For safety. For joy. For any piece of normalcy.

The woman looked up, and her smile had the light in it that had irritated and drawn her in. It scratched at the cold beneath her skin, her father’s enduring gift.

“It’s Dr. Tanaka, right?” She sat down slowly, hesitantly, unsure if she should go.

“Oh! Edrisa. Please! Any sister of Bright’s is a sister of mine!” She raised her finger but crumbled the gesture into a fist almost immediately. “No. That’s… That was not a thing that made sense. Let’s not bother storing that in the hippocampus.”

Ainsley had trouble letting her eyes wander from her smile. She meant it. Edrisa Tanaka was not a performer. She was just happy.

_What had to go right to make that happen to a person?_

“What were you laughing at?”

“Huh?” Confusion sat cute on her wrinkled nose and furrowed brow before it was replaced by that strangely authentic smile again. “Oh! Guess what I’m doing. No. Don’t. Because we’ll be here all evening, and they’ll catch the killer guy before you guess. Right, I mean. You could make lots of wrong guesses, I guess.” The double ‘guesses’ made her smile broaden and her shoulders jump with a silent laugh (still real). “So I’ll just say it.”

She turned her laptop screen so that Ainsley could see it. It was poised on her lap where she was sitting cross-legged. All Ainsley gathered from skimming was a large chunk of text that didn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

“What is it?” she asked.

Edrisa pointed at it, glowing; she _glowed_ , sitting there with a core that wasn’t cold but a seed of something pretty and bright.

“It’s a modern neural network. Basically, it’s a bot that tries to complete the passage if you type something into the text box. And I told the bot ‘I love you’.” She was so tickled with herself that Ainsley ignored the why and how parts.

“Does the bot love you back?” Maybe that was the right approach to her romantic life. It tidied up the mess that came with the human factor. If she could make herself fall for a robot, it would keep any random guy safe from her dad and herself safe from the possibility of ever escaping the cold.

Edrisa’s brow furrowed. She really was very cute when she worked through her confusion.

“No. It doesn’t. Huh. Can’t even get an AI to look at me twice.” Her short laughter was self-deprecating but untroubled. Love hadn’t found her yet, but she wasn’t worried. Ainsley worried it would never happen for her all the time. She worried she was too cold to love anyone truly, worried she was too cold to be loved at all.

“What did it say?” she asked.

Edrisa read from the screen where her _‘I love you’_ was followed by the program’s response, “‘Take good care of each other. You were a bird last week when you were about four years old. And that was amazing. I made a series of notes about the sound of your flight, made these little whispers that I took to the church, that I wear in public, because it makes me feel warm inside. And then you turned into a bird and went to fly and crash. And it was everything I’d hoped for, but the weather is cold. Aren’t you cold?’”

Ainsley looked up at her sharply, but Edrisa was a doctor without a scalpel in her hand even if she’d accidentally read something that took a deep cut to find. Ainsley was used to games and manipulation and people who spoke in lines from scripts. Affectations in front of cameras and conversations that were only noise.

Edrisa simply smiled. “They got me there. If I was a bird, I would definitely crash.”

Ainsley wondered at the small smile that tugged at the corner of her own lips that was neither a lie nor an act and considered the possibility that someone could be warm enough to burn straight through a heart flawed with a seed of ice.

“But before the crash, you’d fly,” she answered.

Edrisa grinned and passed her the laptop. “You try. See what the bot has in store for you.”

She took the computer and thought about it. She hoped the bot was a tarot reading, a promise of things to come. Ainsley felt a smile, an irresistible reflection of the one Edrisa offered, stretch wide across her lips and set her fingers to the keyboard to see what would happen with one word.

_Sunlight._

**Author's Note:**

> I got this idea while playing with a bot myself and got a message similar to the one that Edrisa reads here. I altered it for the story, and somehow this pairing came to me. Now I'm wishing we'd seen her interact directly with Jessica and Ainsley, because I'm really curious what those dynamics would look like since the one she has with Malcolm is so charming. Here's hoping for more Edrisa and more Edrisa + the Whitlys!


End file.
